


nebula memorabilia

by AptlyNamed



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Found Family, Gen, Kylo Ren Redemption, Road Trips, Why is space road trips not a tag tf, everything after the first movie is thrown out the window, i love me angsty redemption arcs this was inevitable, im not planning on reylo tho so heads up theyre most likely gonna be platonic, space roadtrip, the others will maybe show up eventually, unbetaed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-08 00:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17376239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AptlyNamed/pseuds/AptlyNamed
Summary: Rey's running. She just has to trust it's toward something.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> Disclaimer: I have absolutely no idea how the actual Star Wars universe works- I'm kinda just building my own sandbox here with bits and bobs from the actual canon. Sorry?

She leaves Finn behind. It’s not until she’s several light years away that it occurs to her that she could’ve stayed.

The realization comes at the first planet they stop at to refuel. Chewbacca shoos her off almost indulgently when they land, and she is too busy memorizing the dusty pink of the sky on this new world to notice he’d snuck a pouchful of creds in her belt until she’s two streets away. Rey is considering whether she should be mad when she stumbles across her first market and forgets everything.

It’s an explosion of colours- purples that are lush and unfaded, greens deeper than she’d ever seen or experienced, blues so dark that only when the light catches it just right does the blue shine through. She wanders the market, a little struckdumb, occasionally running her hand over a fabric or inspecting a necklace dripping with jewels.

Out the corner of her eye, there’s a flash of red that grips her. Rey’s maneuvered her way through the crowd before she thinks it through, staring at the stall that caught her. It’s a bead stall, and there are hundreds of tiny beads with tinier decorations hand painted on, organized by colour. It’s the sea of red beads that caught her eye, and she picks up a rust red bead after a moment of hesitation, and holds it up to the light. She twists it one way and another, enthralled with how the gold of the decorative paint shimmers. With it in her hand, she can’t help but think of Finn. He would’ve liked this planet, she thinks. There’s a loudness to it that he seems to unconsciously seek out, that relaxes his shoulders the same way Rey’s helmet had on Jakku. She desperately wishes he was with her, that she’d thought to take him with her-

But she couldn’t have. Finn is unconscious, may be so for days or weeks or months and if she’d stayed she’d be _waiting,_ staring at the same sky and hoping that he’d wake up soon, that he wouldn’t _leave_ without saying _goodbye-_

“You gonna buy that?” The merchant’s voice breaks through Rey’s fogged mind and she’s back on a planet where there are no deserts. She’s clutching the bead to her chest and as she tries to remember how to breathe normally.

“How much?” She’s asking before she’s thought it through. It’s a whim, a way to appease her guilt at leaving Finn to watch the sky, but most of all it’s a promise. Rey will go back to give the bead to Finn and tell him stories, hear his, and tell him- tell him-

Well. One thing that a time.

She somehow manages to get the merchant down to a reasonable price, despite how she never lets go of the bead. She gets back to the ship with the bead still held tightly in her fist. Chewbacca looks at her knowingly, and she avoids looking at him until they reach warp speed. The bead goes into a box that goes under her bed, where she tries not to think too hard about as she adds more and more to it.

It feels like a guilty indulgence, when she’s piloting next to Chewbacca. He has no one to store souvenirs for. She feels uncomfortably lucky, in the way she did when she scored good tech and got enough food for two days. The way she’d felt walking out with her hoard, as other kids with spindly fingers and too sharp collar bones watched her. The part of life morality had no place existing in.

So it’s a hell of a revelation one day when as they’re idly talking, Chewbacca casually mentions a spouse.

She gapes as he talks of a life, with drinking buddies, a sister, a family to come home to.

“And you’re here?” Rey asks in shock. She cannot imagine a love that wouldn’t demand possession.

 _Yes,_ says Chewbacca in his rough language. _They know I love them. They also know I’ve loved the stars longer._

“And they’re okay with that?”

He shrugs. _It’s a part of me. They have to be._

“Did Han meet them?” She blurts out, breaking the respectful silence she’d kept on the subject.

 _Once._ Chewie grumbles. _Then he got kicked off the planet._

She laughs and demands the story. She nods in all the right places as she mulls.

“And Kylo?” She asks eventually. This is important, she thinks in that Force thick way she’s beginning to understand.

Chewie pauses. _He met Eccalew once, yes._

Rey notes that he specifies only Eccalew, his spouse. “Did he get kicked off the planet too?” She asks, her eyes sharpening.

_No, he’d run away from home. He was twelve, maybe. The autopilot brought him to us._

Rey can almost see it, Kylo when he answered to another name, gangly and hunched under a weight, looking sullenly at Chewbacca.

_We let him stay the night. We stayed up with him, but I went to bed first. He and Eccalew were hunched together when I checked on them last, speaking quietly. Han showed up in the morning._

“What was he like?” Rey asks. She thinks back to the stormy planet, when she had Kylo’s life in her hands. Underneath the anger and the Darkness, Rey thinks she saw a hint of the gangly boy in her mind’s eye. She wishes that was why she spared him.

 _Well,_ says Chewbacca, _Let me tell you about what he did with a jelly spread and his mother’s notes…_  

\---- 

It starts with Finn, but it doesn’t stop there.

Rey sees a blaster holder in beautiful worn leather that makes her think of the general. She buys a globe with curling plants growing inside it to place at Han’s grave. For BB-8, an antennae that will pierce before it bends.

On a blue plant where the people dance daily and speak in a language like raindrops, Rey sees a vendor at a festival selling silk-like strips with words in the raindrop language embroidered on.

“What’s this one mean?” She asks the vendor, pointing to a cloth strip in dark blue that is lettered black in such a way that it seems like ripples in the fabric. It doesn’t give when she runs a hand lightly down the strip.

“It means unforgiveness,” Says the vendor. Her black wet eyes reflect the light in a way that makes Rey’s breath catch, makes her think of war torches. “But moving forward. Literally, unforgiven and accepted.”

“Your language has a word for that?” Rey asks.

“Ruluppuith.” The vendor enunciates clearly with the odd vocal drop noise of the locals.

Rey thinks of a planet coming apart and an angry boy in the snow. “What will you trade for it?” She asks, because money has no value in this system.

The vendor grins. “A dance, and your name,”

“Rey.” She blurts out, startled.

The vendor blinks at her long and slow, grin still playing over her lips. “Luopu.” She jumps over her stall and pulls Rey into the twisting mass of beings.

(Rey stumbles into the ship later that night, fabric barely creased in the tight grip of her hand. She shoves it under her bed and tries not to think of it again.

Like she doesn’t think of the heavy, cold ring she picks up a few weeks later, or the pack of seeds she gets a week after that.

She doesn’t think, or her chest gets too heavy- but she _knows._ )


	2. Chapter 2

The galaxy takes a collective breath when Kylo Ren goes rogue. This isn’t metaphoric; Rey hears/feels a thousand million gasps, shock reverberating through the universe as Order broadcasts declare Kylo a deserter and a traitor, and offers a mindboggling amount of creds for his capture. Alive, it specifies, and Rey can only imagine what Snoke plans for his wayward apprentice.

Every galaxy explodes in gossip- quietly, of course, so as not to handfeed the Order information- about the favoured son of the Order turning his back on them. Even in the small backwater galaxy Rey and Chewie end up in. Rey nurses a glass of the local alcohol- something watery green that tastes like acrid morning dew- and listens to hushed whispers around her. All just variations on each other: What? Why? How? When? Why? So? Why? Where? Why, why, why?

Rey wonders that herself, but is frankly more preoccupied with whether or not she even cares. Sure, he owes her a life debt, and it’d be nice to know where he is should she ever need to collect it. Sure, she’d like to beat the shit out of him for Han, for throwing away what Rey nearly killed herself waiting for, all for something as paltry as power. Sure, she looked him in the eyes on that wintertorn planet, where at the end of her lightsaber all his arrogance and pretenses were wiped away, and felt something reverberate in her. Not like a mirror, but something else, something deeper, something more. Like finding, almost, like being found. Sure, she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it since, running it over and over in her mind like a tongue over a missing tooth, because as much as it terrified her, it also pulled her, curiosity winding around it. (Sure, tucked deep, deep under her bed: a strip of cloth, a bag of seeds, a heavy ring-)

But, she decides with the resolve of the sloshed, that all means shit all, and fuck the long haired greasy bastard anyway. She takes a deep drink of her alcohol pointedly.

This, of course, is when the Force nails her right in the stomach.

She sprays her drink everywhere, and lays heaving onto the bar counter, only distantly aware of the other patrons’ reactions.

Her pleasant buzz is a distant memory now. She feels- no, she knows- no, she feels the cord of something tugging harshly in her gut. It’s manageable, barely an afterthought to the sudden burning in her mind. Every piece of her demands she follow the tug, she has to follow it, there’s no other path but that that doesn’t end in acidic regret and pain. Rey grits her teeth so hard they creek, feels out the Force, and hits back. _NOT GOOD ENOUGH!_ She tells it, and it recedes. The tug remains. She breathes. Her nose burns from shooting alcohol out of it. She thinks she might be embarrassed now.

The Force leaks back, this time a waterfall instead of a fist. It tingles over her skin, and-

Mother _fucker_ , that’s a stab wound.

Rey yelps and jerks back involuntarily, and promptly falls off her barstool. She clutches her left side, thankfully far away from any internal organs, and- feels nothing. The pain vanishes, and there is no wound under her hand, no blood. She stares at her palm, then at her side.

A many-fingered hand lands firmly on her shoulder and Rey jerks her head up to see the bartender looking warily at her.

“I think it’s time to leave,” they say, frills along the side of their head indicating finality.

Rey clenches her hand on her notwound. “I think you might be right,” She grits out, and hauls herself up. She leaves the bar, mind whirling.

Chewie blinks at her as she staggers onto the ship. He goes to say something, but Rey beelines past him. Faintly she can hear Chewie getting up and following her.

She goes to her room and strips her shirt off immediately. She turns in the little mirror she has set in the corner, this way and that, looking for the wound. Her torso is entirely unblemished but for her older scars. Nothing recent.

Chewie makes a questioning noise, and Rey turns to find him holding her shirt. There’s a new bloodstain on the inside that she doesn’t remember.

Rey curses.

Realization breaks over Chewie’s face. _Force shit?_ He trills knowingly. Rey can only nod, jaw working.   


The snow, the boy, the look in his eye- fuck, but she doesn’t care. Everyone’s got their shit, but you don’t see Rey joining a murderhappy organization bent on universewide domination.

She doesn’t fucking care.

But he ran. But he left. That might- no, that could-

He owes Rey anyway, he might as well pay in answers. (Did he regret-?)

Under her bed, the fabric she bought from Luopu is just barely visible. Artificial light catches on the lettering.

Rey clenches her fists and shoulders past Chewie.

_Rey?_ He asks.

“We’re going to find him,” Rey says in a voice like violence, already beginning to find their heading through the incessant tugging. “We’re going to find Kylo Ren.”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Han, from the afterlife: THAT'S NOT HOW THE FORCE WORKS  
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> vive la redemption arc i guess my dudes


End file.
